I haven't been paying as much time to dates lately as I have to deadlines and creditor due dates. So when I noticed it was June 4th, I was mildly surprised. When I realized that it is precisely five days until my 41st birthday, I was, for some reason, leveled. Meaning I crashed. Came down. Time out. WTF. That kind of thing.
It isn't, this mood I'm in, specifically about no longer being 40, but instead being "in my 40s"; it's more about what a hard year it's been for me. This 40th year, rites of passage that have to come sometime. "Who me? I've been blogging since I was in my 30s!" I can say that. Hooopty doo.
When I run up against my face in the mirror--facing myself--I often run up against my blog too. Echos and mirrors--that's what's here.
Driving back from dropping Jenna at her summer camp, I was lost in thought. About another year passing. About who I am and who I'm not. About how since I started blogging--writing out loud--my world turned upside down. I thought about being at the tail end of a generation who can remember life before the personal computer, before the Internet mattered, before global conversation, when the real world was the only world, and the only way out of it was through books, music, movies.
I tried to name my feeling. Nostalgia? No, it's not exactly that. At least I don't think so. But maybe. And maybe not. With nostalgia, I think, comes a yearning for what was. I don't yearn for the real-world-as-only-world. It's not that I would have our loosely-joined pieces disappear. Nor wish that they had never emerged at all. But there is something to my day of discontent that I think I need to acquaint myself with, and I don't think I can do that, not today, not the next few days, here. I need some time to remember who I am becoming. I need to think backwards and forwards without writing myself in either or both directions. I need to be still.
I know more things about myself as my birthday approaches than, I think, at any other anniversary in my life. About the world, about people, I'm still not sure.
In discussing the theories behind evolution the other day, voicing my thoughts on how I don't believe in the notion--change yes, "evolution" as symantics that would have us believed we are decendents of ameobas and monkeys, no. Where once I might have felt unsure or timid in my stance, this time I wasn't. The more I see of humanity in this world we're building here, the more I know. The human heart. Accept no substitutes.
I've never heard anyone voice words around the opinion I formed years ago that evolution--the monkey kind--was spawned and is used most often to give credence to the argument that the white Ayrian race is superior and more highly-evolved than any other. That the proposition that our evolving from tree-swinging monkeys to stooped over monkey-men to complex human beings doesn't wash with me. Agreeing with creationists that civilization and the birth of humanity started in virtually the same area, evolutionists -- at least those I read growing up -- would also have me believe that "primitive man" just evolved his way along until, finally, he got smart and got out of the caves, then got out of Africa, where he left his less-highly-evolved kin. Then the great migration. Then whitey. Puh-lease.
So today, in thinking about my own personal evolution/revolution/stinking-traumatic-development, I flashed on the "big bang" and the development of flesh and consciousness as it relates to the Internet, which, if things progress as they are, will become more and more of an alternate world for all of us. Simultaneous and alternate. A separate but equal dimension.
How did we get here, to this place we co-habitate online? Was it change and growth, or would you call it evolution. I bet some will. And I fear the scientific connotations of that word could follow us here. If we let it. Would you define the beginnings of our online universe as a big bang? Did we crawl up out of the swamp of unintelligible beings, technical cave men evolved into a separate but related species, we people of the net? Hmmmm. I smell a missing hyperlink.
Yah, it's like that.
Let there be heart.
And so it was.
